1900s, Address at the Prize Day Exercises at Groton School (1904)
Context: Of course, the worst of all lives is the vicious life; the life of a man who becomes a positive addition to the forces of evil in a community. Next to that and when I am speaking to people who, by birth and training and standing, ought to amount to a great deal, I have a right to say only second to it in criminality comes the life of mere vapid ease, the ignoble life of a man who desires nothing from his years but that they shall be led with the least effort, the least trouble, the greatest amount of physical enjoyment or intellectual enjoyment of a mere dilettante type. The life that is worth living, and the only life that is worth living, is the life of effort, the life of effort to attain what is worth striving for.
“It is not pleasure that makes life worth living. It is life that makes pleasure worth having.”
“I believe in one thing—that only a life lived for others is a life worth living.”
Source: Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and the Poet (1983), p. 91
Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. xliii
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)
Context: I felt that night, on the stage, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone. I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it? What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming? (p. 145)
“Writing is a dog’s life, but the only one worth living.”
Source: Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting
“The isness of things is well worth studying; but it is their whyness that makes life worth living.”
As quoted in On Aggression by Konrad Lorenz (1963)
“Count it the greatest sin to prefer life to honor, and for the sake of living to lose what makes life worth living.”
Summum crede nefas animam praeferre pudori
et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas.
VIII, line 83.
Satires, Satire VIII
“It is the encounters with people that make life worth living.”
Variant: It is the lives we encounter that make life worth living.
